Morgan with his News Corp mafia pals
The objective of this piece is the study of Morgan’s revelations about the press that have come back to haunt him as a result of Hackgate and the Leveson inquiry.
Had Louise Mensch MP done her job properly last year and studied the text in depth, she would not have handed Morgan an undeserved apology.
The following list could almost have been read to Morgan by the ghost of Christmas past…
Monday, 24 January 2000, pages 250-1:
‘Had lunch with the boss of MI5 today, Stephen Lander, at his HQ on the Embankment. I knew from his cuttings that he was one of the key intelligence figures in successfully foiling a string of IRA attacks in recent years, which is why he’s now got the job. He was very matter-of-fact about what his organisation does.
“Look, forget all the myths and James Bond tales. We are a disciplined intelligence agency, and our job is not to go around assassinating people or tapping everyone’s phones illegally. Our main job is to find out what bad people are up to and prevent them doing it.”
I asked who the biggest threat to Britain was. “France,” he replied, to my astonishment.
“They have some very dangerous terrorists, mainly of Algerian descent, and given the proximity to our border they represent a very serious and present danger. But there are many other terrorist organisations out there, and we have to keep tabs on all of them.”
“Do you keep tabs on people like me, then?”
He laughed. “Piers, I could read all of your emails this afternoon if I wanted to.”
I think he was joking, I hope he was! I felt a bit safer after lunch than I had before, knowing someone like him is running MI5.’
Morgan’s child-like deference to Lander is nauseating. Morgan is either grovelling to the powerful, or intimidating those less powerful. There is no middle ground with the lead clown of the CNN roadshow.
But what Morgan failed to tell us in his book was the fact that his underling Oonagh Blackman had already developed “supervisory sources” at MI5 and the Met Police, who ‘supervised’ her output. Assisted journalism, a cancer that lead to the manifest symptoms of Operation Motorman and the Hackgate scandal.
But Morgan’s meeting with the DG of MI5 is an important confession and one that destroys other lies pushed by the press. Namely, Peter Hill, former editor of the Daily Express, who told me in 2003 that newspaper editors have no connection with MI5 and MI6....read more
http://newsallianceuk.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/the-insider-is-a-sordid-tale-of-grovelling-and-dirty-tricks-by-piers-morgan/
